Tuesday, 16 March 2010

Of Mice, Moore and Journal Quilts

This weekend mainly ignored the sun tempting me into the garden and concentrated on finishing off a few Journal Quilts that had been on my conscience.

January's 'Indigo Knife Edge' is a photo of a Henry Moore sculpture printed on some Indigo fabric and then stitched using the ideas from my drawing class of rhythmic lines very close together. I'd forgotten how tricky indigo can be to photograph- the above image was scanned, the one below photographed, the reality somewhere in between! The Henry Moore was from when there was an installation at Kew, I'm looking forward to seeing the large exhibition of his work at Tate Britain. February's 'Llangollen Snow' is inspired by the snowy landscape when we went up to 'QuiltFest'. It is recycled from offcuts from 'Thin Blue Line' and 'Breakthrough' quilts, already partially stitched and painted, just a bit of stitching required to join the offcuts and suggest the trees.

I'm rather taken with the back of this piece. Although it doesn't show my machine quilting skills in a good light(was having terrible problems with the tension- the needle didn't like going through gesso!) I rather like the loopy effects. I'm sure if I was trying to obtain this particular 'stitch' I'd fail dismally!For several months I've been struggling with a barely functioning computer. I'd decided that this would be the weekend to back-up everything and grit my teeth and do a total re-install. Ian remembered that the cause of similar problems had been an incompatability between an optical mouse and XP , why didn't I try using a wired USB mouse instead. With nothing to lose ,I plugged in the teeny USB mouse from my laptop. Magic, problem solved, it was worth marrying him!! I've ordered an 'intellimouse' from ebay but while I was round the back of the computer plugging in my printer again (I'd been forced to print from my laptop for the last few months ) I found that although I had separate remote devices for keyboard and mouse, that the keyboard device worked for both. With 2 sets of signals,no wonder the poor mouse was confused and refused to respond to either!